GFAR is participating in the agINFRA project (http://aginfra.eu) of the European Commission (EC 7th framework program INFRA-2011-1.2.2). The project aims at “developing a shared infrastructure and computationally empowered services for agricultural research data”.
GFAR has an advisory role in the project and contributes the CIARD RING as the central directory of datasets for the project.
GFAR has an advisory role in the project and contributes the CIARD RING as the central directory of datasets for the project.
As leader of Work Package 5 in the project ("Data Policies, Workflows, Interoperability and Integration") together with FAO, GFAR has to coordinate activities around data workflows and Linked Data interoperability.
One of these activities consists in supporting partners in the publication of the vocabularies they use for managing their data as Linked Open Data (LOD) vocabularies and in the mapping / linking of these vocabularies to already published vocabularies, in order to improve interoperability. This applies to both metadata vocabularies (vocabularies prescribing metadata properties for different types of data and resources) and Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS, ranging from complex ontologies to thesauri to small controlled lists, used for classifying data).
In agINFRA, the platform used to publish new LOD KOSs is the VocBench (http://aims.fao.org/tools/vocbench-2) offered by FAO.
What the project needed was a new platform for publishing LOD metadata vocabularies: GFAR proposed a platform built on an open-source tool called Neologism (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Neologism), which was just deployed at http://vocabularies.aginfra.eu.
This platform will allow all partners to collaboratively publish their vocabularies, defining classes and properties and the relationships between them.
The agINFRA LOD vocabularies platform is also used to collect and document in one place all the LOD vocabularies used and recommended in the project.
The platform currently lists:
- 12 metadata vocabularies (from generic vocabularies like Dublin Core to the TDWG ontology for germplasm data)
- 10 Knowledge Organization Systems (from AGROVOC to the Soil Thesaurus)
The objective is that of offering a unified overview of the vocabularies used in the project.
However, in line with the principle of ensuring sustainability and not duplicating efforts, all this information will be automatically shared with the AIMS VEST Registry (http://aims.fao.org/vest-registry/browse-by-metadata-sets), a broader registry of vocabularies for agriculture that is maintained by FAO under the CIARD umbrella.